Ritualize Your Night

They go hand in hand, always traveling together. Fascination fuels the quest to recover disowned parts of the self, including your deepest motivations. The object of your fascination is a piece of your real self, lost but loved and intriguing in its insistent nature. It is a projection of what you need to complete your purpose. Sir Frederick Bartlett, the British psychologist, is considered one of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, and his study into remembering stories in the 1930s profoundly inspired later theories about how memories are processed by the brain. Flashbacks are accidental (and sometimes recurring) memories in which a person has a sudden powerful re-experience of a past memory, often so vivid that the person re-lives the experience, unable to fully remember it as a memory and not something that actually exists. These unintentional memories are often of traumatic events or emotional events that are highly charged and often happens in times of high stress or food deprivation, although the exact causes and mechanisms are not clear. The field of neuropsychology emerged with advances in technology in the 1940s, and with it a biological base for encoding theories. In a systematic attempt to identify where memory traces or engrams are formed in the brain, Karl Lashley devoted 26 years of his life to research on rats in mazes, only to conclude in 1950 that memories are not located at all in one part of the brain, but are widely spread throughout the cortex and that if some parts of the brain are harmed, other parts of the brain can take root. The work of the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield on the stimulation of the mind with electrical probes in the 1950s, initially in the research of the reasons of epilepsy, enabled him to produce, practically unchanged, maps of the sensory and motor cortices of the brain which are still used today. By investigating parts of the temporal lobe of the brain, he was also able to summon memories or flashbacks (some of which the individuals had no conscious remembrance of). Another Canadian, Donald Hebb, intuited as early as 1949 that neurons that fire together, wire together, implying that memory encoding took place as links between neurons were established through repeated use. Sometimes referred to as Hebb's Rule, this theoretical idea was supported in the 1970s by the knowledge of the mechanics of memory consolidation, long-term potentiation, and neural plasticity and remained the current theory. In experimentally showing Hebb's rule and knowing the molecular changes during learning and the neurotransmitters involved, Eric works on sea-slugs (whose brains are comparatively simple and contain relatively large, easily-observed individual neural cells) was particularly important. Humanity descended from monkeys: 160. The world and humanity were created by God and are therefore divinely inspired and intrinsically holy: 545. The world is merely a physical product of the physical universe: 190. Life and therefore humanity are purely accidental products of Darwinian biological evolution (mechanistic reductionism): 190. Survival is due to natural selection by survival of the fittest: 440. The world and human life are the consequence of the fall of Adam and Eve due to disobedience and succumbing to the temptation of curiosity.

Life is therefore penitential for original sin: 190. The world is a comedy, a tragedy, a political game board, and more: 240. This is a purgatorial world of hardship and suffering; The world is a rare opportunity for maximum spiritual growth and evolution by the undoing of bad karma and the earning of spiritual merit: 510. This object has a glow about it, and that glow beckons you. If you cannot remember the last time you were fascinated by anything, maybe you are looking for something too dramatic. Fascination can have a mild, everyday face as well. An easy place to start is to notice what sections of the news you automatically turn to, which articles you read, and which ideas get you thinking. The same idea goes for noticing which topics you choose in articles or which type of videos you like. What kind of movie attracts your interest? Consider the themes of the television shows you never want to miss and what you love about them. Think about the stores you keep returning to and what they sell. Ask yourself when you have free time and enough money, what you look forward to doing? Look back at your childhood as well. Parallels between computer and mind processes became visible as computer technology developed in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to advances in understanding the processes of memory encoding, storage, and retrieval. However, the computer metaphor is basically only a more sophisticated version of the previous memory storehouse view, based on the rather simplistic and misleading assumption that memory is just a simple copy of the original experience. In general, the brain and memory, in particular, have a distinct bias towards negativity. It pays more attention to unpleasant experiences and highlights them. Typically, the brain detects negative information more quickly than positive information, and the hippocampus flags negative events specifically to doubly ensure that such events are stored in memory. Even when efforts are made to forget them, negative experiences leave an indelible trace in the memory.

This is an evolutionary modification, given that it is good to err on the side of caution and ignore a few good experiences than to overlook an event that is negative and potentially dangerous. During the 1950s and 1960s, the change in the overall study of memory became known as the cognitive revolution, leading to several new theories about how to view memory and producing influential articles by George, Eugene, Karl Pribram, George, and Ulric Neisser. George Miller produced his influential short-term memory paper in 1956 and assessed that our short-term memory is limited to what he named the magical number seven, plus or minus two. Richard Atkinson and Shiffrin first defined their modal or multi-store memory model in 1968, comprising of sensory memory, a long-term memory, and a short term, which for many years became the most popular model for memory study. The world as exploitative: 180. The world as unfair: 200. The world as karmic expression: 575. The world as karmic opportunity: 600. Q: How does one's personal evolution relate to the world at large? A: An unseen benefit of spiritual endeavor and evolution is its positive influence on the collective level of human consciousness itself. Each evolving spiritual devotee counterbalances the negative effect of great numbers of people of a considerably lower consciousness level. Despite appearances, consciousness-calibration research reveals that the collective consciousness level of humankind overall is moving upward. Thus, an optimistic view is warranted. One can be grateful to have been born with a human's infinite potential for karmic benefit. Do you recall moments growing up when you were fascinated for long periods of time by something? Give some thought to what it was that absorbed your attention. These half-hidden clues probably hold pieces of who you were meant to be. Don't be Afraid of Being SelfishYou are not being selfish when you follow your fascinations and motivation. Following your motivations can also serve the needs of other people. Have you ever worried that your motivation and the dreams it holds are just too selfish to entertain seriously?

This is what many frustrated people believe. Every time they raise a little hope that they can go for what they really want, the fear of selfishness scares them back into inactivity. If there is anything that can singlehandedly promote depression and defeatism, it is the fear of selfishness. Many times we reject what our motivation seems to be pushing us toward, because it may appear selfish and totally egocentric. Fergus and Robert offered an alternative model, known as the levels-of-processing model, in 1972. Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch suggested their working memory model in 1974, which as a method of encoding, consists of the central executive, visuospatial sketchpad, and phonological loop. The early work of Elizabeth, who carried out her pioneering studies on the influence of disinformation, memory biases, and the essence of false memories, was also seen in the 1970s. Endel Tulving's groundbreaking study on human memory from the 1970s onwards has also been highly influential. In 1972, he was the first to suggest two distinct forms of long-term memory, episodic and semantic, and he also devised the theory of encoding precision in 1983. Several formal memory models were developed during the 1980s and 1990s that can be run as computer simulations, including the Quest of Associative Memory (SAM) model proposed by Jerome Raaijmaker and Richard Shiffrin in 1981, the James McClelland, David Rumelhart, and Geoffrey Hinton's Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) model in 1986, and various versions of Thoug's Adaptive Control. The study of human memory is now considered part of the cognitive psychology and neuroscience fields, and the interdisciplinary connection between the two is known as cognitive neuroscience. In day-to-day use, what we usually think of as memory is actually long-term memory, but there are also significant short-term and sensory memory processes that need to be worked through before a long-term memory can be created. Each of the different types of memory has its own specific mode of operation, but they all work together in the memorization process and can be seen as three necessary steps in the formation of a lasting memory. This memory model is known as the modal or multi-store or Atkinson- model, after Richard and Shiffrin, who developed it in 1968, as a sequence of three stages, from short-term to long-term memory, rather than as a unitary process, and it remains the most popular model for memory study. One can also be grateful that one has heard of Enlightenment and chosen to seek it, for such individuals are extremely rare indeed. As reported in prior works, statistically, the likelihood of choosing Enlightenment as the major purpose of one's life is one in ten million. Simply the wish to become a more loving person, and to align one's intention with the energy fields at the top of the Map, is to be of service to the world at large. The way to offset the negativity of the world is not to attack falsehood but to be as friendly and loving as possible within your own respective domain or life. One person being friendly (255) is more powerful than five being hostile (125). Q: What true value can be derived from worldly life?

A: The world can be seen as an optimal stimulus for inner growth, as it is merely a projection of the ego in overt dramatic expression. It is best to learn from it rather than to be seduced by its illusions or entrapped by them via identification or attachment. The worldly panorama reflects the entire scale of the levels of consciousness in their most overt display. The panorama is like a school of discernment where the extremes serve to reveal the essence that underlies appearance. By doing something we deeply enjoy, we have a hard time believing we actually could be meeting the needs of others as well. We do not trust that we have a responsibility to follow our motivations so that others will have the freedom to follow theirs. A different way of thinking about social responsibility is that what brings pleasure and fulfillment to us could also bring pleasure and fulfillment to others. For example, consider how much Linda's staff would have missed that day if she had not taken the risk to act on her inspiration. Motivation feels like a magnetic pull being exerted upon us. It is coming from within, but there is also a sense that there is something on the outside drawing us forward. Consider this thought: maybe the magnetic pull that stirs up your desire and ambition is not coming solely from yourself. Perhaps it is partly a reverberation coming from other people around you. Maybe their needs and desires are subliminally helping to spark your needs and desires. There is no proof that such a magnetic pull or the connection between one person's needs and another person's inspiration exists, but it has not been disproven either. It is also often known as the memory process. It should be perceived that Fergus and Robert Lockhart proposed an alternative model, known as the level-of-processing model, in 1972, suggesting that memory recall and the limit to which something is memorized is a function of the depth of mind processing, on a consecutive scale from shallow (perceptual) to deep (semantic). There is no real structure for memory under this model and no distinction between short-term and long-term memory. Sensory memory The shortest-term portion of memory is sensory memory. After the original stimuli are ended, it is the capacity to retain impressions of sensory information.